


there's no way that it's not going there

by throwaway18



Series: i see you see me [1]
Category: BLACKPINK (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, F/F, F/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25612957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throwaway18/pseuds/throwaway18
Summary: sometimes, we find the right person at the wrong time
Relationships: Jennie Kim/Lalisa Manoban | Lisa
Series: i see you see me [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2004433
Comments: 15
Kudos: 56





	there's no way that it's not going there

**Author's Note:**

> this story is, of course, purely fictional and is for my creative outlet
> 
> please do not link this story to any of the girls as i respect their privacy, and again, i write my stories out of entertainment and nothing more
> 
> with that said, please ship responsibly and be kind to one another
> 
> <3

_You touch me and it's almost like we knew_

_that there will be history between us two._

Their eyes meet.

Right after their hands do.

Jennie retracts hers the moment her skin feels the touch of the stranger who’s in the middle of grabbing the last bottle of beer about the same time as she did. She hasn’t seen her before, not that she could name every single person at Seulgi’s party, but she isn’t nowhere near familiar, hasn’t recognized her around campus. Tall. Brown hair. Doe eyes. Pretty. She must be from another university.

“O—oh, uh, you can take it.” The girl stammers. It’s sort of cute, Jennie thinks.

“No, please.” Jennie places the bottle in the girl’s hands. No skin contact this time. She can’t tell why that’s supposed to matter, brain fuzzy and jumbled like a tangled roll of yarn. Something throbs at the back of her eyelids. Her alcohol tolerance is a pity. Why was she even going for another the bottle in the first place? “I’ve had like, three, so you go ahead.”

“Thanks.” The girl takes it with a shy but gleaming smile. A little chuckle to punctuate her gratitude.

It worsens the knots of yarn in Jennie’s head. The liquor really is taking a toll on her subconscious.

There’s an odd form of relief with the girl walking away from the kitchen, unopened bottle in her grasp. Jennie chalks it up to her tendency of wanting peace for herself, peace from the EDM music, peace from the _hey, Jennie, what’s up, Jennie, over here, Jennie,_ everything becoming _too much_ despite her willingness to be here. To have a good time, she had rationalized, but her head is being a buzzkill.

Then the girl halts midway in the threshold, back turned and face obscured, as if contemplating her decision whether it’s worth it to swim in the sea of inebriated young adults, and after a few beats, she returns to where she had been like it’s where she’s meant to be. Decisive. Unlike Jennie. Tension lays its weight on her shoulders, and she watches the girl expectantly from her place on the barstool by the kitchen island.

“Sorry.” The girl rubs at the back of her neck. “I just really don’t know anyone else here and my friend is, well…” She glances to the corridor leading to the living room where there’s a throng of people dancing, laughing and drinking, and it’s basically a mess of sticky bodies so Jennie understands the apprehension. “She’s somewhere all handsy with someone. I’m Lisa, by the way.”

“I’m Jennie.” Jennie motions for her to sit on the other empty barstool. It’s an impossible task for her to verbalize why she’s inviting her to stay with her if her intention had been to be here alone. She’s indecisive like that. “So what brings you here?”

“A friend dragged me. Said it’s a right of passage for me to get this college experience.” Lisa rolls her eyes good naturedly, settling the bottle on the counter. She hasn’t opened it.

Now, Jennie has always been picky, probably where her indecisiveness has stemmed from, and she has always been skittish around new people, never readily engaging in small-talk on the get-go. So this version of Jennie surprises her, becoming at ease with a person she has only known for three to five minutes. The knots in her head are still there, but it’s paradoxically pleasant, and the rest of her body just embraces the numbing sensation in her skill like it’s normal.

Jennie knows it isn’t. She blames the alcohol again. Is she really _this_ intoxicated? Why isn’t she slurring? Somehow, the room temperature rises out of the blue, then it’s warm, awfully warm that her cheeks heat up for no apparent reason.

She attempts to keep herself calm, to keep herself collected. “You and me both,” she says. “The not knowing anyone else part, I mean. Some know me by extension, but I only really know a total of three people. Including the host and you.”

“Who’s the third one?” Lisa leans in halfway, gauging for her answer and capturing Jennie’s undivided attention. It’s not even intimate, there’s still a respectable distance between them as acquaintances do, but it’s just the two of them in the kitchen and Lisa’s presence prickles Jennie’s flesh like an overwhelming scent of perfume. Jennie tries to answer the question as coolly as she can.

“My boyfriend.”

“Oh.” The tension on Jennie’s shoulders fizzle into smoke as Lisa nods, removes herself from their midpoint, widening their gap once more.

“I see,” Lisa says.

_You touch me and it’s almost like we knew,_

_That there will be history._

_I wish I could make time stop,_

_So we could forget everything and everyone._

A lot of things in life stumble into your way unexpectedly, in the same manner Lisa hadn’t expected her friendship with Jennie, including the closeness that blossomed in their months together. Study sessions at coffee shops have become their weekly thing, and while the other patrons surrounding them are loud and clear as day, they all turn into white noise blurring in the background. She feels like they’ve trapped themselves into an indestructible bubble, a whole separate world of their own that no one else could penetrate.

Not even Jennie’s boyfriend.

Kai is a great boyfriend. He really is. He, like herself, is a dancer so they bond over their mutual interest and get along fairly well. Sometimes, he accompanies the two girls as they hang out, but whenever she and Jennie are left by themselves, Lisa couldn’t explain the bitter taste that bubbles in her mouth. If she were to be honest with herself, the bitterness feels closely like it’s guilt. But she’s not honest, leaving Jennie earlier than intended instead.

It’s easier that way.

And onne day, Jennie decides to drop a bomb on her.

“I broke up with Kai.”

“What?” Lisa nearly chokes on her rice cake. It’s sudden, completely sudden. She swallows the lump down in a hard gulp, taking a faltering glimpse at the few inches of space between her and Jennie. It’s always been there, not too distant but not too near either, like it’s some unspoken agreement they have.

Always to be followed.

Never to be filled.

When she gains the mobility on her lips to speak, she fully faces Jennie. “Why?”

Again, if she were to be honest with herself, there’s a particular response Lisa yearns to hear, a string of words nagging at the farthest corner in her brain. A particular answer she’s afraid to entertain. But again, she’s not honest, shoving the suffocating emotions into the depths of uncharted territory.

Jennie takes a deep breath. She doesn’t meet Lisa’s questioning gaze. “I got a scholarship in Paris.” She has this faraway look in her eyes, staring blankly at the horizon from her seat on the bleachers. The field isn’t as quiet as they hoped it would be. Joggers are sprinting around the oval track while soccer players are practicing their drills on the grassy lawn at the center. It’s just like their setup at the coffee shop where everything else blurs, except that Lisa’s vision blurs too, only processing the word, _Paris_.

“That’s great!” Lisa says, somehow forcedly after a stretch of silence, unsure if Jennie has caught the obvious crack in her voice. If she has, then she has a good way of hiding it. Jennie has an impeccable poker face anyway.

“Just not the break-up thing.” She laughs nervously, though her mind is telling her that this is the most inappropriate time to laugh. Jennie doesn’t seem fazed by her reaction, but she turns and studies how Lisa’s expression become all over her face, those intense cat-like eyes burning holes through her shirt. It stings. And Lisa continues to react as awkwardly and as nervously as possible. She runs her sweating palms on the length of her jeans to distract herself. “But, wow, that’s real cool. A scholarship. All the way there. In Paris…” she trails off, with Jennie nodding, moving farther than her original position.

Once more, there’s added space between them.

Neither of them says anything else.

They lose touch for a while.

_'Cause when I got somebody, you don't  
And when you got somebody, I don't_

Jennie visits two months later.

Lisa misses her arrival.

Not when she’s busy celebrating her monthsary in the arms of her new beau, hand-in-hand and oblivious at the most romantic spot in Seoul. She hears from Rosie, a friend of theirs, about Jennie being back in town. _“She was going to surprise you, but looks like she’s more surprised about you and Jackson.”_ The bitterness in her mouth resurfaces, it’s almost nauseating, but Lisa chucks it out of her mind, sealing it with a kiss on her boyfriend’s lips. If she were to be honest with herself, she would admit that the kiss isn’t working, but again, she’s not so she pretends that it is and kisses him thrice.

She still contacts Jennie to tell her she can drive her to anywhere she wants to go to on the next day and to see her off on her departure.

Jennie says there’s no need, says she’s already boarding.

She has cut her trip short.

As the plane takes off, Jennie leaves Seoul without so much as a goodbye, clutching the key necklace she had planned on presenting to Lisa to match her own lock necklace.

_I wish that time would line up,_

_So we could just give in._

_We just dance backwards into each other,_

_Trying to keep our feelings secretly covered._

Jennie reconnects with Kai.

He has gotten himself an internship in Paris and they both rekindle their old flame. Things sails smoothly for them like they haven’t been apart for the past two years, instantly picking up where they left off. They have effortlessly fallen back into their old patterns, and there’s really no pressure for Jennie to try too hard. Yet, she embraces him more than she used to, kisses him harder than she used to until the knots in her head loosen up.

And in those two years, it doesn’t surprise Jennie how she and Lisa have drifted apart.

They have already lost touch for two months.

What’s two years for them?

It happens.

What they do occasionally have are hours of long video calls every couple of months, ranging from anything to nothing at all. Lisa tells her stories about Jackson which makes Jennie’s stomach churn uncomfortably, but she soldiers on with the tales of their dinner dates, fights and all the things in between. The discomfort doesn’t simmer. It churns and churns and churns, then Jennie becomes accustomed to it, forgetting it’s even there, materializing once again when she’s alone in her bedroom.

Most of the time, Lisa would wind up falling asleep, her iPad’s camera continuing to record her sleeping face. Never in her lifetime has Jennie felt so _painfully_ near but so _incredibly_ far from someone. The knots have moved their residency to her chest, constricting its threads around her heart. They stay tied there like they have found their home. She couldn’t bring herself to end the call, only wanting for it to last longer, even without having Lisa saying anything.

Jus there, lying next to her equally sleepy cat as Jennie gapes at her in her bed, tracing the outline of the younger girl’s solemn features on the screen of the laptop, wishing the device has the magical ability to transport her to the place she wishes she could be the most. And before the sun rises in Seoul, Jennie would then end the call and head to school without much sleep but would have a temperament that’s refreshed more than ever.

She temporarily erases the call from her memory as soon as Kai sees her after class.

_You touched me and it’s almost like we knew,_

_That there would be history._

_There’s no way it’s not going there,_

_With the way we’re looking at each other_

Months pass and Jennie receives news from their friend, Jisoo that they will be travelling to Europe.

They will be in Paris for a day.

A friend of Kai’s throws a party in his loft and extends an invitation to their visiting friends, and long story short, everyone has crowded in the main living space causing Jennie to desperately seek for fresh air. She walks over to the balcony, closes the double doors behind her and leas her arms on the bars of the railings.

“Getting too loud for you, huh?”

She twists her body and finds Lisa sprawled languidly on the chair at the side, cheeks flushed and eyes lidded from the round of shots she has taken half an hour before. Jennie nods with an exhausted smile. Lisa rises up from her seat, trying to balance herself by holding onto the railings but her knees fail her, and Jennie rushes to her in time. Her long arm is draped over Jennie’s shoulders and she whispers a “Thank you.” Breath hot and mouth intimately close, _dangerously_ close to Jennie’s reddening ear.

Jennie is taken aback by their proximity, heartbeat speeding its tempo.

This is the closest they have ever been.

Jennie doesn’t let her panic show, cautiously placing Lisa’s arms on the railings just so she would have something else to do rather than think about her crimson face. But Lisa even though her arms aren’t around Jennie’s body anymore, she’s leaning onto her like a lifeline, and Jennie strikes up a conversation to derail her thoughts from the thunderbolts sparking at the exact location where Lisa’s arm touches hers. “So how are you and Jackson?”

Lisa tilts her head at Jennie.

She’s close.

So _close._

“I’ve been single for three months.”

The Parisian wind blows past them, the cool breeze puckering goosebumps on Jennie’s exposed skin. Jennie shivers at the contact, but she mostly shivers of how Lisa’s fingers have crawled their way to brush against hers, starting with her thumb, then to her pointing finger, until her entire palm cover Jennie’s hand. Jennie doesn’t question it, her voice stuck in her drying throat. Neither does she withdraw her hand as Lisa takes one more step closer, finally crossing the invisible boundary they have set between them.

Pools of longing swirl around the taller girl’s coffee-colored eyes, and no words have to be exchanged to comprehend the severity of their situation, but they both remain mum, their eyes doing the communicating for them. Lisa’s eyes lower to Jennie’s partially opened mouth, tension heavy in the atmosphere. The knots have overtaken Jennie’s barely functioning reasoning. A voice is screaming at her to get a hold of reality, but her body is just so drawn to Lisa’s dipping head, her eyes closing at their noses brushing and at her heart racing with anticipation.

And when Jennie thinks Lisa is about to do the one thing she has always wanted to do for years, Lisa widens her eyes.

A moment of realization.

A moment of sanity.

She steps back, ridding Jennie of the warmth from her hand. Her eyes are going wild, gazing at everywhere but her.

“Sorry.”

Jennie blinks. Breathes. Catches herself. Mentally slaps herself. She shakes her head, leaving Lisa by herself and muttering before she goes back inside.

“Me too.”

_But maybe we can hold off one sec,_

_So we can keep this tension in check._

_There’s no way it’s not going there,_

_With the way we’re looking at each other._

**Author's Note:**

> a little something i wrote in 2019 which i decided to rewrite into something more at par with my current standards haha hope you liked it


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